Monday, March 25, 2013

The Meanwhile In AfghanistanWorld Tour goes to Europe from April 16th through June 24th. My tour of Europe will start in Norway, then zigzag between Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, after which it will zigzag between England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. And possibly elsewhere -- dates are still being added! But most of the shows I'll be doing are confirmed by now and are listed below. (New gigs will be added here and at www.davidrovics.com as they are confirmed!) Please spread the word!

I'll be doing material from my latest CD, Meanwhile In Afghanistan, songs from my upcoming CD, Everything Can Change, and lots of other stuff... Become a subscriber and get your laminated card granting you entry to any of the shows for free (not to mention lots of free CDs, and lots of my gratitude for your support)!

THE TOUR:

Tuesday, April 16th, 8 pm
House concert -- contact Gerd Berlev for more info if you'd like to attend!
ValbyCopenhagen

Sunday, March 10, 2013

I more or less joined the hippie
subculture by the age of seven or so, when my parents thankfully
realized that me and normal public school weren't mixing well, and I
needed to be among my own kind. By a freak coincidence, the New York
City suburb we had moved to several years earlier because they had
“good schools,” happened to actually have a good school in it, a
product of the 1960's cultural renaissance called the Learning
Community.

I consciously recognized my hippie
nature when, you could say, I became a member of the opposition.
Because upon graduating from the sixth grade, there were no more
hippie school options for little David, and I went for the first time
since my abortive attempt at first grade to a non-hippie school, in
this case a public school full of the children of Republican
businessmen, Middlebrook Junior High School, run entirely (or at
least so it seemed) by pasty adult products of the 1950's.

Surrounded for the first time by
children who were clearly not hippies, I realized I had a very
different value system than the vast majority of these little
consumers, and I started feeling very special and very isolated at
the same time. Having grown up in the Learning Community, I thought
that sharing, cooperating, enjoying and discovering were what it was
all about. The positive was emphasized, and little time was spent
dwelling on the negative. So it was only once I was completely
surrounded by it that I understood that the converse of all this was
that competition, hoarding, selfishness, proving that you're better,
“winning” – make people miserable.

I have never adjusted well to
mainstream society. Early in my adult life in the ranks of the
workforce, I was employed as a typist at the age of 23. After being
on the job for a couple months I learned that I was being paid better
than any of the other typists because I was the fastest. The guy who
sat in the cubicle next to me was a working class Republican, which
is conceptually perhaps even more annoying than being a rich
Republican, but nonetheless I liked him because he treated his
coworkers with cordiality and respect, despite the fact that his boss
was a female Democrat and the guy sitting next to him was a
long-haired, pot-smoking, self-proclaimed Maoist at the time (me).
Anyway, when I learned I was being paid more than anyone else ($12 an
hour before taxes) I didn't feel at all good about it, and I wanted
to ask my boss if she'd consider either giving the other typists a
raise or lowering my wage and raising theirs so we were even. But no
one would tell me how much they were being paid. So I felt fairly
unequipped and unsupported in my idea, and never pursued it further.

Nobody in my immediate or extended
family, none of my friends in public school or their parents talked
about such things either. But the value system I learned to embrace
in elementary school told me that how much money someone made didn't
matter, in terms of their value as human beings, as friends, future
spouses, etc.

Of course, if you don't value money
beyond making what you need for you or your family to live a decent
life, and if you're a basically not-very-well-organized hippie
musician type, you may not know how much money you make. Taking me
for example, when I used to make a living as a street musician I
carried around what I called my wallet, which was a bag of coins that
usually weighed about ten kilos. Eventually, in order not to
embarrass my girlfriend at the time, I started going to the bank and
changing the coins into bills, which is what the other street
musicians generally did on a regular basis. If you watched another
street musician in action for a half hour or so you could generally
get the idea of what kind of money they were making, which always
depended on various factors including how good they were, what kind
of material they were doing, where they were playing, and at what
time of day or night they were doing it. At the end of the day all
the street performers would naturally count their earnings, whether
they did that publicly or once they got home. For any of them it
would be very easy to figure out how much you were making per hour on
an average day, but there was only one other street performer in the
Boston area aside from me who didn't mind talking about that.

I don't think it had to do with
musicians not wanting to divulge information that might be helpful to
the competition in terms of figuring out where and when to play what
kind of material. Most of the performers were quite obviously just
playing the kind of music they liked anyway, which was usually not
the familiar pop songs that could have made them the most money. I
think people didn't talk about it because of their training growing
up; if you're not making much money you should be embarrassed, and if
you might be making more than someone else you shouldn't want to risk
making people feel jealous by talking about it, because of course
money is what everybody wants.

The one thing I have found that people
sometimes feel OK about asking, though quietly, in private, and often
in hushed tones, is “do you make a living at this?” It's usually
pretty clear that this would be the first in a series of questions on
the subject, if the person asking felt comfortable with follow-ups,
but they almost never do. This is as far as they can go.

But if for no other reason than mutual
aid and support between fellow musicians and other cultural workers,
and more broadly for the millions of self-employed people out there
(or at least people attempting to be self-employed), having regular,
honest and open discussions of the actual numbers involved with
making a living as a musician would seem very useful.

But I'm still gonna back up a little
bit more and give a little more context for why I think this is the
case. Chiefly, the largely self-imposed mystique of the arts. Maybe
it's not a coincidence that “musician” and “magician” sound
so similar in many languages. One thing most professional or
aspiring professional musicians have learned along the way is that it
benefits them, at least on one level, to maintain an air of mystery
about what they do and how they do it. If people are under the
impression that a) what you do is something that requires innate and
rare talent which other people will never have, and b) even though
you're not really famous yet, you are about to be -- then they're
more likely to talk about you, which is what you want, because then
more people will want to come to your shows so they can say “I was
there back when he was playing for crowds of two dozen people in a
noisy bar.” I know artists who have managed to maintain this
almost-famous mystique for decades without ever getting the major
label deal they were constantly rumored to be on the brink of.

But this air of mystery is a
double-edged sword. By maintaining this almost-famous mystique, the
idea of actually earning money as a cultural worker, having certain
standards for remuneration, joining a union, or otherwise figuring
out how to make a living on the assumption that you will never be
signed by that major label (and if you do you'll probably starve
under their auspices just as well) – all just seems passe and
beneath anyone's attention. So what if the gig at the festival
doesn't pay? There's an audience, and that A&R guy just might be
in it this time. You'll get exposure! (But you won't die of it,
hopefully...)

I played at a festival once where I was
staying in the same cheap motel with most of the other performers.
Many of the bands playing at the festival were ones I had heard of,
what you might call second-tier celebrities. No hits or any of that,
but bands with a solid national and international following, where
many hundreds of people would regularly pay to hear them play a show,
on their good days. So I was somewhat shocked to learn that among
the musicians I interrogated, a consistent pattern emerged: because
of the massive overhead expenses involved with touring as a band,
rather than as a solo artist, none of these bands were making a
living as a band. If anyone in the band was making a living as a
musician, he or she was doing this because he or she had a solo
career. When they tour as a band, the band members all have flexible
day jobs that allow them to tour regularly, make a little bit of
money if they're lucky to do better than break even on the tour, and
then go back to work. The lead singer in the band usually would then
continue to tour as a solo artist, and between touring as a solo
artist and touring with the band, that person would often be making a
living as a musician.

And then what does making a living
mean? Different things to different people. In Portland, Oregon,
where I live, the local musician's union is on a perpetual campaign
to convince local musicians not to play for less than $25 per person
for a gig. A very talented musician friend around here who usually
does a bit better than that at his gigs claims to be making a living
because he's paying his rent and eating, but he only has 17 teeth by
his own count. (Normally you should have 32, give or take a couple.)

Of course, on the flip side of not
wanting to talk about money out of embarrassment of one kind or
another or because you want to maintain your almost-famous mystique,
is not wanting to talk about money because you really just don't care
about it as long as you're eating three meals a day and sleeping in a
room with a roof and four walls on a fairly regular basis.

Early on in my musical career I was
fairly deeply exposed to two very different models of how to go about
attempting to be a full-time performer. I played backup for two
brilliant artists on different tours around the US. One artist's
mantra was “I'll drive eight hours for a $25 gig.” The other's
was, “you need to make about $500 for most of your gigs or you
won't be able to make a decent living.” I tried out both
strategies over the years since then and found that the latter
strategy, though ridiculously practical and way less sexy, is the one
that works.

My method of trying out these
strategies, however, was pretty much haphazard, because I never kept
track of anything. I mainly gravitated towards the “try to get
$500 to do a gig” methodology because, to my surprise, I found that
wherever you go, you'll get better-organized and better-attended gigs
if you ask for more money, and that includes among the Left. Since I
had also discovered that although I had no interest in getting rich,
having a certain amount of money was very useful for eating and such,
it didn't seem like rocket science to take the risk of certain fringe
elements of the anarchist scene calling me a sell-out, to start
asking for more money to do gigs. (Which in itself requires having a
following or making connections with student groups, unions, and
other organizations with budgets, but that's another story for
another blog post. Or you can just buy or borrow my booklet, Sing
for Your Supper, for more on that subject.)

But until very recently I never truly
understood the sense of my friend's $500 figure, or, to put it
another way, I never understood fully why contractors like traveling
musicians need to get paid so much more than your average hourly
worker in order just to make ends meet. I can thank my wife, Reiko,
for further developing this understanding, because several years ago
she took on the unenviable task of sorting through the receipts and
invoices that I now try to remember to save, and filing our taxes for
us, with the help of the nice accountants whose office is a few
blocks from our apartment.

Half of the accountants down the street
have pink hair and are themselves musicians. I heard about them
years ago from a message one of them sent to me on MySpace. I guess
they noticed I was local, and figured I might need my taxes done, and
some of them specialize in doing taxes for musicians. Having not
paid taxes since the last time I had a normal job, circa 1990 or so,
I would normally have ignored such a message. But Reiko was moving
in with me from Japan, we were getting married, and in order for her
to get her papers to stay in the US we had to start filing taxes (and
even five years' worth of back taxes).

I just brought our 2012 tax filings –
a stack of papers several inches tall that Reiko neatly divided into
folders – to Anne the accountant this afternoon. The impression I
get from her is that the vast majority of self-employed musicians
don't file taxes – since, she said, any time musicians file taxes
with her it's because they're doing something that requires them to
have a record of having filed and paid taxes, such as their spouse is
getting a Green Card or they're buying a house. So self-employed
people who aren't marrying a foreign national or buying something
really expensive often don't have much of a paper trail of any kind
and basically don't need to file, so they don't.

(For those reading this who aren't from
the US, a clarification: the only reason most people file taxes in
the US if they're not self-employed is because they basically have
to, since their employer has been taking lots of money out of their
payroll all year, and if they file they get a little of it back. In
other countries people file taxes so they can take advantage of
government services. It generally doesn't work that way here – the
government only takes from us so it can buy bombs, it doesn't offer
services in return like in civilized countries. It wouldn't even
occur to most people in the US who are filing taxes to think that
way, unless they're approaching retirement age and will soon quality
for their Social Security pittance.)

I asked Anne how many of her musician
clients make a living entirely as performing artists. The answer
took me by surprise. None.

When I had a kid seven years ago I
decided to stop touring all the time, and to just tour as much as I
needed to to make a living, spending the rest of the time at home
with my family. Since we started collecting receipts, filing taxes
and otherwise keeping track of things in a way that I have never
bothered doing previously, the numbers are no longer something I need
to wildly guess at, and it's all a bit more distressing than I
thought.

I learned that for every two dollars I
make touring, on average over the course of the year, I spend
approximately one dollar on traveling expenses – and that's despite
the fact that I'm only staying in hotels about 5% of the time I'm on
tour. Maybe I eat too expensively, but if you want to stay healthy
on the road long-term you can't live on gas station hot dogs or fast
food, and you don't have time to cook for yourself. In 2012 I toured
a bit less than I did in 2011 – I was away from home a total of 202
days (some of it with my family, most without). During the course of
those 202 days I did 120 gigs. Practically speaking, when you take
into account travel days and the fact that it's hard to do many good
gigs on a Monday or Tuesday, that's about how many shows you can
realistically do in 202 days of touring.

If the average gig among those 120 gigs
paid $500, that would be $60,000 total, so half of that would be
$30,000, which is what I would then have for paying rent, feeding,
clothing and healthcare for my family, and everything else – car
insurance, the car loan, taxes... But when the average gig comes out
to more like $350, as was the case in 2012, then I basically earned a
total of $20,000, which, after rent is paid, comes out to just over
$200 a week for the three of us to cover all our expenses. And we
spend quite a bit more than that on an average week (partially thanks
to my very expensive, aging teeth), thus the $10,000 or so in credit
card debt.

So basically unless we're going to
forgo dentistry, live on cat food, or some other popular American
cost-cutting measure, if I'm to make a living as a musician I have
three basic choices: a) spend 202 (or so) days on the road, do 120
gigs, and get paid an average of $500 per gig, b) tour more than that
and get paid less on average per gig, or c) tour less and get paid
more. Given that option B would result in absentee fatherhood and
the sure death of any normal relationship, and option C starts
becoming financially unrealistic unless you have a bigger following
than me, it seems like option A is the only way to go.

So if you find yourself touring
incessantly and working your ass off but you just can't make ends
meet, (like most musicians), consider the possibility that this is
because you're not making $500 per gig on average, and there are only
365 days in a year, or you don't eat enough cat food. And the next
time you're thinking of organizing a benefit concert and asking a
touring musician to play at it for free, think about that!

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

I don't know about you, but I feel a somewhat surprisingly personal sense of loss at the death of President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. Anything else aside, this man and the popular social movement he has played a huge role in, not only within Venezuela but around the world, has been a massive, positive influence for untold millions of people. He and the many positive aspects of the transformational process that has been underway in Venezuela and most of Latin America, really, especially since 1998, have changed the lives in a very physical way for millions of our sisters and brothers, and have been an inspiration for those struggling to make the world a better place in every corner of the Earth, very much including within the belly of the imperial beast, here in the USA.

For those of us who have spent much of the past 15 years protesting in one form or another at gatherings of the global elite -- meetings of the World Trade Organization, the World Economic Forum, and other such spectacles -- there was always one consistent voice within those meetings that denounced these elitist proceedings as eloquently and as firmly as his friends in the streets outside the halls of power.

And as the years have passed since his first landslide election victory in 1998, one after another Latin American country has seen the left come to power, with people like Evo Morales go from leading a union to leading a nation. I don't have any idea what those of us in places like the USA would have done over the past 15 years without the example of the Bolivarian Revolution shining its light in what often seems like an otherwise fairly dark room. An imperfect light, to be sure -- I can already imagine some of the emails I'll be getting by tomorrow from some of my favorite anarchists -- but a powerful light nonetheless, and Hugo Chavez has been at the center of it.

One of the most memorable experiences of my life will probably always be December 17th, 2009, on a very cold, cloudy day in Copenhagen, when I had the privilege of being one of the performers to warm up for Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales and other speakers at a large hall a short walk from the house I usually stay at when I'm in town.

Here's a video someone took of me singing my "Song for Hugo Chavez" at that event, which was broadcast soon thereafter on Venezuelan television. (I know this because I got emails from both supporters and detractors of the Commandante after it aired, which made reference to this song on the TV.) The picture to the upper right was taken from the door to my bedroom here in Portland, Oregon. It's a tattered poster from that event 4 years ago.

And here is a video from the great Uruguayan songwriter, Daniel Viglietti, which I think sums up the spirit of the Bolivarian Revolution brilliantly, his song, "A desalambrar" (with English subtitles on this video).

I'm sure I'll have more to say on this subject later, but for now, signing off. La lucha continua!

Sunday, March 3, 2013

I thought I'd post this "open letter" to the People's Music Network for Songs of Freedom and Struggle just so PMN members who may want to easily refer to my suggestions on expanding and broadening the organization can do so. The letter follows!

I
had a really good time at the PMN gathering last weekend. I think
PMN is a wonderful event in a whole variety of ways – a great
social space for sharing songs and hanging out with a wide variety of
people, mostly acoustically-oriented musicians representing the whole
spectrum from great to not-so-great and lots in between. The
workshops also involved all sorts of useful content for those looking
to improve their crafts, and for those preferring to do a song swap
instead, a variety of them were conveniently running concurrently to
all the workshops.

With
no qualification needed, I enjoyed the weekend a lot. During the
course of the weekend a lot of different people, mostly long-time PMN
participants, brought up the subject with me of how to improve PMN
gatherings in such a way that they might attract more youth, more
accomplished young musicians interested in topical songwriting and
such in particular, as well as more people of color.

Although
I'm now solidly middle-aged, and no longer particularly care how old
anybody is anymore (even if I do still notice these things), I was
once a fresh young kid who discovered PMN for the first time. I was
profoundly affected by the experience of going to many PMN gatherings
over many years, and then, still more or less a youth (under 30) I
stopped going for many years. Since then I became a fairly
accomplished professional musician with a significant youth following
in many different countries, along with a following among those of
older generations. I think all of this makes my story and my
thoughts on attracting youth to PMN potentially relevant, so I
thought I'd share them with you. (Feedback of any kind most
welcome!)

When
I first got to PMN in the winter of 1990 or thereabouts, I was a
budding songwriter. I wasn't very good, but I was very enthusiastic.
My friend Chris Chandler had convinced me to come. He and I were
both flat broke – Chris a professional street musician back then,
and I a barely-employed office worker. I was already a big fan of
Pete Seeger, Phil Ochs, and Fred Small, so I was appropriately blown
away to be spending an entire weekend in the presence of Pete, Fred,
as well as Phil's big sister. I don't think I had yet heard the
music of any of the other folks there, but I quickly became a huge
fan of Charlie King, Pat Humphies and others I discovered there, and
have been ever since.

Aside
from satisfying my need for advice and affirmation from these iconic
figures, I also enjoyed hearing new songs of varying quality from
everybody else, being part of the song swaps and the Round Robin,
etc. But what I enjoyed the most at those PMN gatherings was hanging
out with the other young musicians who were there. Back in my
twenties, it was important to me to have other people my age to hang
out with. I identified more strongly with people closer to my age,
and this is very normal for young people.

Then
sometimes I'd show up at a gathering and the little group of 4 or 5
young musicians I was hoping to see weren't there at all, or only one
of them showed up. I had basically got the affirmation I needed from
the icons I had discovered at PMN after a few gatherings, and after
that there just wasn't enough to keep an ambitious, budding young
songwriter interested in coming back much, because it's just no fun
to be the token youth in a gathering of people mostly old enough to
be my parents or grandparents.

Again,
I'm 45 now and I don't feel this way anymore at all, but I recount
this because I know what I was feeling was totally normal and that
other young people who came to PMN back then, as now, feel the same
way as I did. I think PMN gatherings do have a lot to offer young
musicians, though, and I like to hear from people who think it would
be nice if PMN could attract more youth. I think I know how this
could potentially happen, so I thought I'd share some ideas in case
anybody thinks they're useful ones to pursue. I should say perhaps
now that I have no interest in being on the steering committee or any
of that, but if those of you running the organization would be
interested in pursuing any of these ideas, most of them are ideas I
would personally love to be involved with implementing if I had
backing to do so.

The
overview not to lose sight of here, I think, is the main thing that's
necessary to attract more youth is to attract more youth... If there
are a critical mass of 20 or 30 people under the age of 30 coming to
PMN on a regular basis, they will keep coming, I think. If the
number gets too low, the youth may just drop out completely until
that changes. So a “jump start” is what's needed as far as I can
tell.

I'd
say the biggest single way to do jump start youth participation is to
address the issue of cost. $140 is way too much for most youth to
contemplate spending, especially young people who are struggling to
pay their bills by playing music. This element of society – young
musicians – are some of the poorest in the USA, along with youth
generally, and youth of color in particular. There needs to be a
subsidy through a grant or something like that, so that the website
can clearly state that the cost for youth is something like $40 for
the weekend, rather than $140. The young people don't want to feel
like they're coming as beggars when they see there's a sliding scale,
or when they see that youth are encouraged but “youth” is not
defined. I would suggest that “youth” be clearly defined as 30
or under, and the youth price be something like $40 for the weekend,
and that the money necessary to subsidize this be found somehow. (I
realize money doesn't grow on trees, but...)

But
with or without making that change, I'm certain there are other
things that can be done to attract youth. From my experience,
though, there's no single magical solution. But just as with
organizing a well-attended concert, the best promotion is lots of
different kinds of promotion. Each kind might bring in a few more
people. Together, it amounts to a big crowd. If I had to make a
prediction, I'd predict that each one of the following suggestions
could bring in a few more youth to future gatherings, and taken
together, the effect could potentially multiply. But I don't like
making predictions, because whether a promotional strategy goes viral
and really works is very hard to predict. These sorts of things have
worked for me, though, to increase my audience, and I think they
should all apply to increasing attendance of PMN gatherings, and
certainly they will help increase awareness of PMN.

Facebook

There's
a lot of activity on the PMN Facebook pages, and it's being very
well-used, which is great. The PMN group has over 1,000 members, but
the organization's page that people can “like” only has 246
“likes.” For those who may not know, when someone “likes”
your page on Facebook, they then get on the page's “news feed.”
They see (or might see) the things people post that way. So it's a
very good thing to have lots of people “liking” your page.

One
successful way I've found to increase “likes” is to set up my
Facebook page (www.facebook.com/davidrovicsmusic)
so that anytime someone “likes” the page, they are offered a free
download of my latest CD. “Likes” can be further increased by
advertising on Facebook that people who “like” a page will be
able to download a free CD. Advertising can be targeted according to
geography, so the advertising budget is well-spent on people who live
in, for example, the northeastern US, and might be most likely to
come to a PMN gathering if they're the sort of person who would want
to click on the PMN free CD offer. (They're unlikely to bother
“liking” the page or downloading the CD unless they're already
into leftwing folk music, or think they might be.)

Twitter
and YouTube

On
PMN's main website the link to the Twitter account doesn't work, and
the link to the YouTube account takes people to a page with two
YouTube videos on it. The Twitter account should be set up and
linked to the Facebook account, so updates can be sent through both
of the most relevant forms of social media on the landscape today.
The YouTube page could feature dozens or even hundreds of videos of
PMN artists, and could be updated regularly when PMN artists write a
new topical song. This would drive lots of traffic to the YouTube
channel, including people who would then subscribe to the updates
and thus get sucked in to the PMN fold that way (hopefully). To
further amplify this effect, every time a new video is uploaded to
the YouTube channel, this can be announced on Twitter and Facebook.
Each time this is done, there will be more Twitter followers signing
up and more people “liking” the Facebook page, from my
experience.

PMN
Livestream

For
those millions of people out there who might like to come to a PMN
gathering if they knew PMN existed, if they had the money, and if
they lived in the northeastern US, but they lack one of these
essential qualities, I think livestreaming parts of PMN gatherings
would be tremendous. The effect of doing this wouldn't be immediate,
but it would have an impact down the road, I'm pretty sure.

Livestreaming
on the web would of course allow people to see parts of what's
happening at PMN remotely. Given the drawbacks of watching something
on the web as opposed to being there, I think it's extremely unlikely
that many people would just stay home and watch it on the web rather
than coming in person. Rather, people will watch who would otherwise
not be there, but might want to come in the future after seeing stuff
on the web. The livestreamed event would then be archived on the
livestream channel for some time, and would be there for people to
check out in the future as well. Livestreaming is something that can
be done essentially for free, it's just a matter of someone taking
their iPhone (or whatever they're using for this) to workshops,
plenaries, concerts, etc., and filming. This could be done by
volunteers, whether it's something that one or two people take on for
the whole weekend, or something that's divided among a bunch of
people.

PMN
Podcast

Another
medium to take advantage of is the podcast. What people tend to
respond to on the web these days are not static websites, but media
that changes and updates regularly, like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube,
etc. Same with podcasts. Most people will look at a post, a new
video, or a new podcast soon after it's put up on the web. After
that the numbers will tend to trail off. So the new stuff has to be
put out there regularly, in drips. My idea with a PMN podcast is to
hype the upcoming gathering each month in the form of a podcast,
which could be an hour-long interview with one or more of the
musicians who have been booked to perform at the next gathering's
Friday night concert, to interview organizers of the gathering, folks
who have played at PMN in the past, etc. This would be yet another
way of generating buzz, which is something performers as well as
organizations all need, very much including PMN.

“Skillshare”

Among
DIY-minded youth these days, the “skillshare” is a popular
phenomenon. People come together somewhere and lead workshops on
subjects they're familiar with. I think it'd be good if there were
more emphasis on the skillshare aspect of PMN, and perhaps to expand
that aspect of the gatherings somewhat, perhaps with more panel
discussions along with the workshops and song swaps that already
happen.

Other
Website Updates

Although
the social media presence will generally attract more attention than
the less dynamic home page, which doesn't get regularly updated the
way social media does, it's still important to keep the website up to
date, especially for those who might be thinking of actually
attending a gathering. The music history section should include
something on forms of politically-oriented music that have blossomed
since the 1970's, such as punk rock and hip hop. Also the section
with links to the websites of members could be dramatically expanded,
which could also make the page a bit more of a real resource for
people looking for this kind of music. It's currently too limited to
attract the kind of attention I suspect it would attract if it were a
more expansive list of artists.

Thoughts
On Bringing In Different Artists

Over
the years PMN has always featured artists that don't fit into the
typical acoustic guitar-slinging folk revival tradition, which is a
fine thing. However, pretty much every time I recall organizers and
others at PMN talking afterwards about how they wished that bringing
in different sorts of performers would attract different sorts of
audiences. As someone who has participated in lots of multiple-bill
events, I would just say this: it's unrealistic to expect fans of a
hip-hop artist to want to spend money to hear their favorite hip-hop
artist play a 20-minute set that's couched in between a bunch of
acoustic folky stuff they don't think they're going to like. Fans of
the artist in question will go hear them do a full-length show
instead, or they'll go hear them when they're playing with other
artists with which they are familiar. Also, the hip-hop artist in
question is unlikely to want to promote their appearance in the PMN
show, because a) they suspect much of their audience wouldn't like
the show overall and b) if they're not getting paid to perform, there
is a strong financial incentive for them not
to promote the show, especially if they have paying gigs happening in
the same area around the same time which they would like to have an
audience come to. Remember, we're talking about some of the poorest
members of our society here – musicians. These are not people who
are always able to ignore their financial needs and promote a show
which they're not making money at – even if they might want to do
that (if they think their audience would like to hear the other acts
on the bill).

Additionally
– even if the artists on the bill for a Friday night show are
actively promoting the show to their people, here's the thing: most
audiences for any show for what we could call “third-tier
celebrities” like me, Charlie King, Emma's Revolution, etc., are
going to be coming because of the efforts of the local people
promoting the shows. Our own email lists by themselves won't do
much. Although I may have a hundred fans in every major city in the
US, most of them aren't on my email list. By my estimate, my own
promotional efforts may have brought 5 people to the Friday night
concert who might not have come otherwise.

The
idea has been mentioned of trying to interest more well-known artists
to participate in PMN in order to try to attract more youth. One
thing worth mentioning is that many of the more well-known artists we
might think of inviting do not actually have much of a youth
following, even though they're famous. You can see this at their
shows and on their YouTube stats. But it seems possible that
involving a more well-known artist could attract more people, if not
more youth. I suspect it would mainly attract more people to the
Friday night concert, but not to the rest of the weekend. I don't
have enough direct experience with working with rock stars to know
this with any certainty, but to the limited extent I've worked with
them at different events, this is my suspicion. I would also say
that until PMN does have a bigger youth element, it's premature to
invite such people to participate, and would be better to wait until
there's a bit more momentum in that direction happening first.

OK,
I'll stop there, and look forward to hearing from anybody who's
interested in talking about or implementing any of these ideas in the
future.